The Kindness of Strangers: The Autobiographyby Kate AdieHeadline £20, pp374

Kate Adie, the BBC's veteran war correspondent, could hardly be less like Tennessee Williams's wilting heroine Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire, whose catchphrase was: 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.' But Adie has chosen Blanche's words for her title and, in a way, it is more fitting than it would at first appear to be. For Adie is more comfortable with strangers than with herself. There is also a sense in which, like Blanche, she does not want to be seen in full light.

Adie's autobiography is tireless and entertaining but it is one of the most defensive books I have ever read. She can't - or won't - cover the home front at all. She seems to have taken a decision that there is no call for personal disclosure about family or lovers, as if she were a news story about which discretion were desirable. She sketches in a middle-class childhood in Sunderland and in a line (blink and you've missed it) lets us know that she was adopted. There is a moment in which she describes a 'rocky love life', before returning to public trouble spots to hide behind camera.

Hide behind camera? Is it possible to be reserved when you're at war? You bet. There is a photograph (one of a jolly selection) of three women at Buckingham Palace: Kate Adie receiving the OBE with her sister, Dianora Bond, and birth mother, Babe Dunnet. Their smiles - and chins - are identical. The book is dedicated to 'Babe' - and Adie falters on the brink of telling the story of meeting her mother - but flunks it. Instead, she bundles the story into this sentence: 'For I was now part of a much bigger family, having met my own mother and a wonderful, welcoming tribe of kind and fascinating relatives.'

Only one character is discussed as family - the BBC itself. Like a complicated father, the BBC has contradictory attributes: amateurish, dedicated, tolerant, autocratic. It is an affectionate but exasperated portrait - Adie is lacerating about management's influence on news.

She knows how to tells stories against herself, though. This book is 'My Brilliant Career' disguised as 'Great Gaffes of My Time'. Let no one cast the first stone - Kate Adie will do it - and knock herself out. She has a talent for it, an eye for the absurd.

Early on in her career, she was sent to interview an African dignitary at Heathrow. She had no idea who he was or why anyone should be interested. 'What do you wish from your visit to London?' she ventured. He replied: 'To change planes.' The interview did not improve. Back at the BBC, she was asked: 'What's his name?' to which she replied: 'Ah, there you have me.'

Her enjoyment of her job is unwavering: 'But I loved Northern Ireland' or 'One of the curiosities of rioting is the extent to which it is fun...' She takes us on a dizzying globe-trot (you feel like something squashed at the bottom of her suitcase by the end) to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Libya, Tiananmen Square, the Gulf - and is at her best in action.

It is harder to define what the action is about, and she often admits defeat. Of Bosnia, she says: 'It was as if someone had decided to play a lethal board game and failed to produce a set of rules. However, break an invisible rule, and you got blown off the board.' Libya 'wasn't like a country, it was a kind of mad boarding-school where the rules were unknown but the punishments fearful'.

By the end of The Kindness of Strangers, the slapstick wears thin. She has a tendency to use verbs Postman Pat would approve of - she is 'tootling' in Sri Lanka towards a murder scene or 'scuttling' to get away from sniper fire. In Bosnia, she describes climbing trees and hiding under kitchen tables and, in a compelling account, sheltering in a chicken shed while machine guns finished off a village.

Kate Adie underplays her courage - with the exception of a single description, which resembles a demented kung fu film, of getting her tape about the protests in Tiananmen Square past three policemen: 'I kicked him in the groin, punched the second with my left hand, and body-charged the third.'

You have to admire Kate Adie. For, whatever else she is, she's a trouper. She still has part of a bullet from Sarajevo lodged in one of her toes - serious and absurd - a suitable decoration for Kate Adie.